TAP talks to filmmaker Jeffrey Blitz about his new documentary on the lottery, and how luck and hard work interact in America:
I think the way my idea of luck changed wasn’t personal but cultural. I came to feel that social policy based on a diminished sense of luck in the world was actually very likely to be cruel. People who deny that luck plays a massive role in how we all live — people who insist that everyone must be responsible for themselves, willy-nilly — are people who ignore the aspect of luck that they’ve been graced by.
Whether that’s the luck of being born to rich parents or being born white or male or American or being born healthy or into the care of parents who have the resources to deal with illness, all of it is luck.
I think people like to frown on people who play the lottery. It’s easy to see them as deluded. It’s easy to imagine them as uneducated. But I think there’s another way to see it — that they are people who are more aware of the role of luck, good and bad, in their lives.